ASR corpus design for resource-scarce languages

Abstract:

The authors investigate the number of speakers and the amount of data that is required for the development of useable speaker-independent speech-recognition systems in resource-scarce languages. Their experiments employ the Lwazi corpus, which contains speech in the eleven official languages of South Africa. They find that a surprisingly small number of speakers (fewer than 50) and around 10 to 20 hours of speech per language are sufficient for the purposes of acceptable phone-based recognition.